Dynamic Event-Triggered Scheduling and Platooning Control Co-Design for Automated Vehicles Over Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

This paper deals with the co-design problem of event-triggered communication scheduling and platooning control over vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) subject to finite communication resource. First, a unified model is presented to describe the coordinated platoon behavior of leader-follower vehicles in the simultaneous presence of unknown external disturbances and an unknown leader control input. Under such a platoon model, the central aim is to achieve robust platoon formation tracking with desired inter-vehicle spacing and same velocities and accelerations guided by the leader, while attaining improved communication efficiency. Toward this aim, a novel bandwidth-aware dynamic event-triggered scheduling mechanism is developed. One salient feature of the scheduling mechanism is that the threshold parameter in the triggering law is dynamically adjusted over time based on both vehicular state variations and bandwidth status. Then, a sufficient condition for platoon control system stability and performance analysis as well as a co-design criterion of the admissible event-triggered platooning control law and the desired scheduling mechanism are derived. Finally, simulation results are provided to substantiate the effectiveness and merits of the proposed co-design approach for guaranteeing a trade-off between robust platooning control performance and communication efficiency.